For a long time, I had thought that it was always better to read ever faster. Curiosity was the biggest drive to read for me. I have read a lot of books, articles, and journals. When I understand a concept, my heart rates rise. Then, I feel immense joy from understanding a concept. I become satisfied, but I will repeat this cycle.
One day, I began to suspect that my reading method may not be good enough. I often have trouble remembering the source of the supporting ideas, so it takes me a long time to find the actual research. I started to feel this more strongly when I began to write seriously.
The most disturbing thing was that I should have a tremendous amount of knowledge from cumulative research because I read many books or journals in the past. The reality is that I do not recall most of the things I learned from these books. It is because our memory is short-lived unless we put them into long-term memory.
I thought reviewing some pointers after reading the books helped me to remember them long-term. During my first reading, I highlight the critical points of the book in my kindle, and I review them in a few days.
Unfortunately, this system did not work well. There were so many books in my kindle that I could not maintain the reviewing system. So, I created a system, which forces me to reexamine the highlighted items from books I read. These highlighting notes help me find the source of a concept as long as I remember which books held the highlighted items.
The primary benefit of reading fast is I can surface-read books quickly. I can read a lot of books or other materials for research purposes. If your objective of reading is to enjoy casual reading, there is no problem reading fast. I can finish multiple books in a day if I want to do so. However, the effects stop at the extent of surface reading. I may not remember stories or things I learned a few days later.
If I want to make my reading more meaningful and effective, I must exercise a more active reading strategy. For example, to perform literary analysis, I must put conscious effort into recognizing the pattern while reading. Unless I am actively seeking and reevaluating the reading materials for relevance to what I need, no amount of reading is good for me. I would rather sleep more or exercise. No matter how fast you can read the materials, it is not as helpful as you think.
To exercise active reading, I started to take notes directly onto kindle. Rephrasing is a powerful method to understand the texts you are reading. It helps me to retain certain concepts for the long term. Then, I faced another challenge. My notes were still all over my kindle books. Unless I start reviewing all of them periodically, the knowledge will fade away from my memory. I still need to remember which book each note belongs to use as a source.
Smart Note Taking Techniques You Can Use While You Are Reading
One day, I found an excellent book, “How to Take Smart Notes,” written by Sonke Ahrens. The book taught me to effectively read books and retain the knowledge to use them later. According to Ahrens, you will need to do the following steps:
Take temporary notes as you read. Taking quick notes helps you to retain the information you just obtained. Ahrens suggests that handwriting is better since it takes a longer time to write than typing. It takes a long time to type in kindle unless I use a PC to read a digital. So, you will become selective of which information you keep as a note. So, I use the kindle note function.
Summarize the temporary notes in your own words within a day after the quick notes are created. Brief notes are temporary. You must elaborate the note in your own words, which reinforces the ideas. I HAD TO REREAD THE SECTION when I did these steps a few days after my initial notetaking. So, I found it is faster to do this process within a day.
Classify the summarized notes. Sonke explained that students seem to retain what they learn better when the professor teaches unorganized materials. I do a similar step for organizing my 10-page notes every day. Organizing unclassified information helps you to retain the information better not only digitally but also in your brain.
Tag the notes to other notes you have created. Using software such as Zotero, you can easily tag other notes while making a permanent note. Ahrens explains that making cross-references requires serious thinking, and it helps us develop our thought about the idea (p. 112).
Think about what is not in the text and add them to your note. This process requires additional effort to process the information. You dive further into the text since you are now challenging and creating your idea against the new data you are learning. Unfortunately, I rarely do this process.
I use Zotero to make my permanent notes. I can create my categories and sort all my permanent notes. The use of the software made my life much easier. It can add the info of the reading material for future bibliographies. You can also organize and tag the note to link it to another note. Finally, the use of the software is free.
The new process takes a lot more time to read a single book. In some cases, I may read the section multiple times to create a decent permanent note. These extra steps made me more selective of the information I intended to retain. The important thing is I start synthesizing the new information more thoroughly than before.
Conclusion
There is one thing I am still working on is thinking about what is not in the text. This process is challenging and time-consuming so that I tend to get lazy. Maybe I may create a habit of adding one idea of my own to a note per day.
If someone asks me whether they need to learn speed reading, I would say no. Instead, I recommend that they find a way to retain the information gained from the book just like I did. No increase in the number of books one can read is helpful if you forget what you read.
Reference
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking—For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book writers.[kindle edition].
Zotero’s Link